FATHER
BOUNDARY BREAKER
DESIGNER
CONNECTOR
INTERVIEWER
There is a particular kind of restlessness that comes from watching people get it wrong for a long time. Aaron Lyles spent years inside the machinery of brand strategy, hospitality, and marketing, working with startups and Fortune 500s, watching organizations pour enormous energy into understanding their audiences and consistently miss the point. The tools were fast. The data was plentiful. And almost none of it captured anything that mattered.
The problem was never a lack of information. It was a lack of listening.
Somewhere between the boardrooms and the focus groups, a fundamental truth kept surfacing: people will tell you everything if you give them the right space to do it. Not a form. Not a five-point scale. A conversation. One built on respect, on consent, on the understanding that someone's story is not a data point to be extracted but a relationship to be earned. That conviction became the seed of something.
He didn't set out to build a survey company. He set out to prove that the entire premise of how organizations collect human insight was broken, and that fixing it required more than better software. It required a different philosophy. One rooted in behavioral science, in the ethics of consent-first design, and in the stubborn belief that how you ask someone a question matters as much as what you ask them.
So he built Warren. Named for the interconnected tunnels where the rarest rabbit on earth finds safety, Warren is a conversational intelligence platform that treats every participant like a person worth listening to.
The Platform
Warren captures voice, video, and text. It uses conditional logic shaped by behavioral science. It asks people to rank, to reflect, to tell their story in whatever medium feels most natural. And it does something surveys almost never do: it makes people feel heard.
The results speak in numbers that shouldn't be possible. Completion rates that go beyond industry benchmarks. Opt-in rates that would make most research firms suspicious. Stories collected in the hundreds where organizations expected dozens. Not because of some trick of design, but because when you stop extracting and start exchanging, people show up differently.
The Practice
Today, Nesolagus works across education, nonprofit, urban place management, and civic sectors, partnering with institutions that are ready to replace assumption with evidence and engagement theater with the real thing. Every project begins with a discovery workshop. Every survey is a custom-built conversation. Every deliverable is designed to move an organization from guessing to knowing.
Aaron runs Nesolagus the way he built it: lean, deliberate, and allergic to doing things simply because that's how they've always been done. He brings in trusted specialists when a project demands it, advisors with deep expertise in K-12 education and public space strategy, engineers and researchers who share the same intolerance for busywork and the same respect for the people on the other end of the screen.
There is no bloated team page here. No org chart designed to impress.
Just a founder who would rather build the thing right than build the thing fast.